It has taken some time and work, but our president has invented a new language. "Obamese" and "Barackish" aren't quite right, so let's call it "Obamish." Obamish uses English, but it does so to confuse most listeners while really communicating with only a few. Obamish is a language based on lies -- but, when it's effective, it's a language that establishes plausible deniability around the implementation of politically risky, far-left policies. Obamish is an arrogant language, premised on a need-to-know custodial view of...
"There are two important things in politics. Money and I can't remember the second thing." -Sen. Mark Hanna (1837-1903) If Wisconsin voters think Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett is the kind of guy who fights on behalf of the poor against the rich, they need to wise up. The man who carries Democrats' hopes to unseat Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker in the June 5 recall election took sides with wealthy Indian tribes who successfully sought to freeze out competition for their casinos. The poor...
Last week at American Thinker, I posted an article on Obama's position on "gay marriage," which I considered in light of the Marxist/communist position against traditional marriage. I noted that the current president of the United States now possesses the most radical/non-traditional view of marriage and the family of any president in the 200-plus-year history of this republic, and that this radical non-traditionalism is fully consistent with the Marxist/communist worldview. I quoted Karl Marx on the "abolition of the family" and underscored the...
President Obama has ridiculed Bain Capital and Mitt Romney as job-destroying vultures. He said, regarding Bain, that attacks are legitimate. "This is what this campaign is going to be about." Romney should welcome the discussion -- as long as he frames it, not Obama. First, what is Bain? What is a private equity firm? Essentially, it's a company that manages, invests its own money, or raises capital for an equity stake in another business or company. Frequently the target companies of private equity...
A recent press release from Massachusetts Governor Patrick's office joined the unanimous praise for the City of Newton, a suburb of Boston with a population of 84,000: Last week, Mayor [Seti] Warren signed a contract requiring 100 percent of municipal and school department electricity needs - equal to 70 million kilowatt hours over the next three years - come from renewable sources starting on July 1, 2012. The initiative will save the city over $300,000 over the next three years...Newton's decision to power...
On May 16 and 17 of 2012, Channel One Network, a national distributor of educational videos and newscasts viewed daily by over 8,000 middle and high schools, aired a two-part video series, titled "Young and Muslim in America" and "Islam in America." In "Young and Muslim in America: How being a part of Islam changed ten years ago, Part 1," students watch as Muhtasham Sifaat, 18, kneels on a prayer rug inside an empty classroom. His voiceover explains how he moved around a lot when he was...
A few weeks ago my family and I went to Lake Tahoe for a little snow skiing. We had a great time, except for some obvious "grade deflation" that occurred with the ski slopes. I skied some intermediate slopes and fell many times, indicating that the slopes were probably really expert skiers. Either that, or the laughably improbable alternative that I am not in as good shape as I was only a few years ago, when I could ski down expert slopes without...
Don't expect Mitt Romney to pull a John McCain. A safe bet is that there will be no Sarah Palin-like surprise when Romney announces his running mate. The reason is that Mitt Romney doesn't need a stunner to grab voters' attention or swing the momentum from Barack Obama. President Obama's charisma counts for squat this year. In big ways and small, the 2012 election isn't the 2008 version. Romney's veep pick will reflect that critical difference. The Daily Beast ran an article in...
Leave it our friends in the Mainstream Media to find ways of publishing accurate numbers to create fake stories. It's the other side of Dan Rather's fake-but-accurate coin. A guy could stay busy simply fact-checking the fact-checkers. In today's exercise, I look at three specific "news" articles published in recent days. We're killing innocent men! I'll start with a story from CBS News, headlined "Study: 2,000 convicted then exonerated in 23 years." In case you have any doubt about whose agenda that might...
The cult of diversity has claimed four dozen more victims. On May 8, 2012, nine men were convicted of rape, conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with minors, trafficking for sexual exploitation, conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with children, sexual assault, and aiding and abetting a rape. All nine of the men are Muslim, eight are British Pakistani, and one is Afghani. The gruesome details of the crime are in themselves barbaric, but the responses from British police are languid and discomfiting....
Governor Romney can best respond to criticisms of his record at Bain Capital by focusing on value creation as the key to both jobs and shared prosperity. He is a veteran at creating value, and that is why he is capable of bringing jobs, jobs, jobs to America if elected. He can explain, and the American people can understand, why when government creates jobs without creating new value beyond their cost, we become poorer as a nation. In late November, 2008, then president-elect...
Let us start with a simple premise: It is one thing to emote to an ideology, yet it is quite another to live out its reality. Generally, liberals tend to rely upon emotion to push their agenda, while conservatives tend to rely more on pragmatism. Raising the minimum wage to theoretically provide a "living wage" to the poor sounds good, but the reality has generally been higher unemployment of the lower-wage-earners. A prime example is California. For many years, California governance has been...
Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy, France, and the U.S. are close to bankruptcy, and they all have the same problems: profligate government, large trade deficits, and bewildered economists. Moreover, the G8 statement was ruling out any real solution to the huge unemployment problems of the Southern Eurozone. All of the Eurozone countries with high unemployment rates have negative trade balances (as measured by current account balance divided by GDP), and all the ones that are doing well have positive trade balances. Furthermore, the worse...
JPMorgan Chase recently announced that its London office suffered a $2-billion trading loss from a flawed hedging strategy, with the losses expected to get worse. In a conference call, CEO Jamie Dimon said, "The portfolio has proved to be riskier, more volatile and less effective as an economic hedge than we thought. ... There were many errors, sloppiness and bad judgment." This trading debacle has led to frantic, knee-jerk calls for more regulation. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka says that JPMorgan's trading loss shows...
Apparently, my previous article on the famous "Situation Room" photo tapped a nationwide nerve. The response ranged from some eye-opening tips on other photos to a few perplexed criticisms as to the motivation for Photoshopping a Situation Room photo. The answer to that latter question can be summed up in one simple thought: To hide the truth. Obama was out golfing while the OBL mission was unfolding, and the administration needed the Situation Room photo op for public perception -- to give the...
Five million Americans have been thrown under the bus. They are walking around dazed, outcast, and defeated. Worst of all, they are not even counted in official tallies of the unemployed. They are those whom the Obama administration simply wishes to ignore: working-age adults who have dropped out of the labor market completely. They are those for whom the economic recovery underway should have created jobs but has not. Despite Obama's latest assertion of having created 4 million jobs in the last 26...
I don't know if you been following the stories about the problem some bloggers such as Robert Stacy McCain, Patterico, Liberty Chick, Aaron Worthing, and Virginia attorney Aaron Walker have been having with harassment by a convicted felon, domestic bomber Brett Kimberlin. Kimberlin now runs a not-for-profit called the Justice Through Music Project. Kimberlin, a jailhouse lawyer, has also filed dozens of suits. Stacy McCain has actually moved to an undisclosed location because of threats. Lee Stranahan has put together a short video...
Judged by today's campaign rhetoric, we now live in a war zone. Democrats insist that the GOP has declared "war" on women and opened a second front with a "war" on the poor. Thus far, Republicans have yet to accuse Democrats of war-mongering, but if they choose this option, let me suggest a possibility: the Obama administration's "war" on poor blacks, especially the young. This is a remarkably stealthy war, and one hardly noticed by Republicans, but the carnage far outshines what Republicans...
Some time ago, I joined the National Council for the Social Studies, the NCSS. I've since had that membership canceled -- I suspect because they read some of my pieces and realize I'm neither a social studies teacher nor a groupie. However, thanks to that fleeting association, I remain on several NCSS e-mailing lists, and every so often something very interesting drops into my laptop. The occasion was that the New York State Board of Regents (the body which oversees public school curricula)...
World powers are scrambling to find some magic formula that will ratchet back rising tensions over Iran's nuclear weapons program. United Nations (U.N.) International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) secretary-general Yukiya Amano flew to Tehran on Sunday, 20 May 2012, for last-minute talks with Iran's chief nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili in advance of the P-5 + 1 talks scheduled to begin in Baghdad on Wednesday, 23 May 2012. His trip follows by several days a remarkable op-ed, authored by a distinguished group of Western...
Anyone who knows something about the radical feminist movement of the '60s and '70s will be gripped by déjà vu when looking at photos of the recent "War on Women" rally in Los Angeles. Once again, leftist women were toting placards with slogans like "Get Out of My Womb" and "Get your rosaries off my ovaries," and "If I wanted the government in my womb, I'd f**k a senator." But something is radically changed from the '70s. What the bra-burning, wire coat hanger-toting,...
The other day, I called a friend and interrupted her mid-cry. She'd just returned from putting her only son on a plane to China, where he was moving after giving up on getting a job here. The next day in the supermarket, I bumped into another friend, looking downcast. She told me her only son was planning his move to Hong Kong, after a fruitless year-long search for a job in the financial sector. "Obama's destroying the economy," she told me; then she...
"In the future everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes." -Andy Warhol In 1970, George Winne, Jr., achieved his Warholian 15 minutes of fame by setting himself on fire on the campus of the University of California, San Diego, to protest the war in Vietnam. These days you can achieve the same notoriety if you've done nothing more than bronze yourself to a deep pre-cancerous glow like tanning addict Patricia Krentcil. Or, you can take things several steps further by doing...
The per capita federal debt is $31,000 growing. Much of Europe and many American states are facing practical bankruptcy. As the creditworthiness of the United States and many states is been downgraded, the cost of simply servicing the existing debt will rise. Add to these woes vast unfunded entitlements and money simply created out of thin air by the Federal Reserve System, and it is hard to see how even very aggressive Reaganomics can save us. Government is so far in debt that...
When I watch the Democratic attacks on Bain Capital, I wonder: just how do Democrats think the economy is supposed to work? Take the Kansas City steel plant that Bain took private in 1993 and reassembled as GST Steel. Here we had a faltering unionized steel plant. Nothing remarkable about that, of course. Unionized steel plants had been going out of business for two decades previously, because they were just too expensive and antiquated to be profitable. I remember experiencing that visiting Cleveland,...
Believing that government oversight committees can penetrate the darkness in the General Services Administration, an organization that has lost its way, and navigating without a compass or sextant, the Congress is at best rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Real reform will require smart political leadership from the top. Senator Boxer stated boldly in her committee's opening remarks that "[t]o those who betrayed the public trust, let me be clear -- the party is over." Senator Inhof's opening statement in the same...
Afghanistan has been an international conundrum since 1979, when the USSR invaded the country. The military and other conflicts in Afghanistan have known numerous twists, turns, and permutations since then. The most recent episode, however, took place at the end of April, when president Obama made a surprise secret visit to Afghanistan to meet with Afghani president Karzai. The occasion of Obama's visit to Afghanistan was the first anniversary of the assassination of al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden. And he had a mixed...
One can find more evidence of the erosion of true federalism in the state of Utah. In a report proffered by Jonathon M. Seidl for The Blaze this past Thursday, a Salt Lake City-area high school is forced to pay a $15,000 fine for operating a soda machine during school hours. The administrators for Davis High School must now find alternative means to fund fine arts programs or cut the programs accordingly. The report by Mr. Seidl indicates that the operation of the...
It is reasonable to believe that someone attempted to commit fraud in a commercial context when Barack Obama's literary agency published that he was born in Kenya. The few known facts seem to provide enough to constitute probable cause to probe whether an unlawful act occurred. Regardless of whether this is probed at law, and depending on what other underlying facts may come to light, there appear to be troubling legal and moral issues involved. The free market depends on honest quid pro...
The 2012 election season has begun in earnest, and the mainstream media find themselves in the position of having to defend and reinforce a failed president, Barack Obama -- the man they chose to sleep with in 2008. The media are systematically pulling out all the stops to destroy Mitt Romney, the Tea Party movement, and major Republican financial contributors in an undeclared but understood alliance with the Obama re-election machine. The two pre-eminent pillars of the mainstream media, The Washington Post and...
